The Prison Consensus

The project

Thirty years ago, Brazil had incarceration rates comparable to Scandinavia's. It now has the third-largest prison population in the world, with around 900,000 people behind bars. Across decades of growth and recession, of rising and falling poverty, and under governments from the centre-left to the far right, the expansion of the prison system has been a constant since re-democratisation.

Brazil's prisons are widely described as a failure, including by those who run them. Most units, including the newest, are governed by organised criminal groups, and massacres still happen. Yet there is broad agreement among NGOs, courts, investors, political parties of the left and right, and even criminal organisations that the response should be to build more prisons in order to "humanise" the system and reduce overcrowding. We call this agreement the prison consensus.

The project asks why the consensus holds, how it is reshaping Brazilian society, who benefits from it, and how large-scale prison investment is financed under otherwise tight public budgets. It is a three-year study funded by the Leverhulme Trust, based at the Centre of Latin American Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge.

Research questions

1. How and where has the prison system expanded in Brazil?
2. What political processes have enabled this expansion?
3. How has it been legitimated?
4. Who profits from it?

Hypotheses

We test two hypotheses. First, that new prisons reproduce the conditions of violence and vulnerability that sustain organised crime. Second, that while new prisons offer a modern architectural form of punishment, they also create new territory for criminal groups to contest and control. Fifty-three such groups now operate in prisons, and in parts of cities, across every Brazilian state. In the 1970s none of them existed.

We also look at what prisons produce besides confinement: jobs, contracts for private companies, debt, corruption and costs, and the claim that more prisons will fix the problems that existing ones create.

How we work

The consensus in their own words

Translated from Portuguese.

Publications

Published · Open access

Growing in and from Crisis: Environment, Labor, and Capital in Brazil's Exponential Prison Expansion

Bruna Angotti, Graham Denyer Willis, Pedro Mendes Loureiro and Luiz Fernando Toledo. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2026, 1–18. doi:10.1080/24694452.2026.2688357

Abstract

Although there is widespread academic recognition of the damage effected by carceral systems, of the accelerating climate fallout, and of the unequal and crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, these three dimensions are rarely conceptualized in relation to each other. Drawing on extensive primary research conducted across Brazil, we document how managers have increasingly sought to make claims about the prison's usefulness for combatting problems of the economy and environment, such as by using prisoners in climate-saving efforts and attracting private capital into prisons. We argue these claims to the prison's social good do not promote social inclusion, reverse climate change, or secure the competitiveness of the Brazilian economy, but, in offering an always-escapable claim to the prison's usefulness, they entrench the growing momentum of the carceral system.

Forthcoming

Failing to Grow: How Walls Become Doorways in the Making of Brazilian Mass Incarceration

Graham Denyer Willis, Bruna Angotti, Pedro Mendes Loureiro and Luiz Fernando Toledo. Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Forthcoming

Policy and its Underside: Planning for the Prison

Bruna Angotti, Graham Denyer Willis, Pedro Loureiro and Luiz Toledo. In S. Balakrishnan, N. Phelps and L. Sotomayor (eds), Routledge Companion to Urban Planning: Planning for the Worlds Between. London: Routledge.

Team